The Thomas Martindale Mysteries

Background

The main protagonist for this mystery series is Thomas Martindale, a journalism professor at an Oregon university who used to be an investigative reporter on a magazine in New York. The setting and his background will provide many opportunities for stories. On the one hand, there is the university with all its diverse characters, clashes of ego, outsized ambition, and uniquely cloistered environment; on the other, there is Martindale whose investigative reporting experience gives him the ability and curiosity to delve into situations most laymen would ignore. He is a detective without being a detective. Beyond that are personal problems that compel him to take more chances than the average professor. These situations make his life exciting, but also put him into danger more often than he cares to admit.

The stories take place on campus and the nearby Oregon Coast where Martindale has a weekend house and spends a lot of time. Both locales offer a number of plot possibilities.

The university is an ideal setting for mystery novels. Within the dull, arcane, and often unrealistic world of most institutions of higher learning dwell people who are ruthless, cunning, and resourceful in their quest to succeed. While they don’t often resort to committing murder to achieve their goals, it doesn’t take much of a stretch to imagine them doing so.

The Oregon Coast has lighthouses, secluded coves, crumbling cliffs above the rough sea, bridges, and boat docks—all of them excellent places for finding murder victims or putting a hero in danger.

The situations depicted in the novels could happen anywhere, on most any university campus. Readers will pick up information on the academic world along with finding out who-dun-it. Although the books use real places as settings, all of the characters are fictitious, as are the circumstances of the murders which form the core of each story.

That isn’t to say that things like this couldn’t happen on a university campus. They’ve just never happened quite this way at Oregon State University. What I’ve done instead is to use situations I’ve experienced and types of people I’ve known and worked with in 24 years as an OSU faculty member in journalism and English and as a public affairs assistant to the dean of liberal arts.

Prior to coming to OSU, I owned my own weekly newspaper, was a correspondent for McGraw-Hill World News in Los Angeles and Houston, bureau chief for Business Week in Denver, and a senior writer for Medical World News in New York. During my career at OSU, I have written a number of freelance magazine articles and eleven books, all of them about journalism and photography. I have lived on the Oregon Coast for nineteen years and have become very familiar with its nooks and crannies—and possibilities for murder and mayhem.

Books in the Series

The world of classical music, incriminating fingerprints, and a federal justice system gone wrong ensnare Thomas Martindale in one of the most difficult situations of his professional life. In a story that takes the college professor/amateur sleuth from the scene of a terror attack on the Yaquina Bay Bridge on the Oregon coast to New York and back to a secret terrorist camp near Drift Creek Falls in the Coast Range, Murder in E-flat Major also describes Tom’s life as an author and the often hilarious world of meeting the public on book tours. As in the past, this quest occurs when he tries to help a friend, a cellist in the local symphony orchestra. “I have heard that death can come in many different ways,” she tells him, “but never by cello.”

Before he does anything else, Thomas Martindale must get out of jail and clear his name. In the process, he has to find the real killer of a close friend and stop the fiendish plans of her former husband, a biologist who wants to use human subjects in deadly virus research. His search leads him to an abandoned and spooky sanitarium in Oregon’s Coast Range where he finds both danger and horror. Enough, in fact to live up to the title of this book, Descent Into Madness.

Yaquina White brings Martindale back to the setting of his debut as an amateur sleuth, the Yaquina Head lighthouse on the Oregon Coast. The white in the title stands for cocaine, and Martindale’s accidental involvement with a drug gang distributing the lethal substance. With the gang after him, he goes into hiding in the Arctic as part of a media tour put on by the Coast Guard to highlight its study of global warming. Leaving the tour with two other journalists, he joins the hunt for a renegade ship that is carrying a mysterious cargo over the North Pole down the Pacific Coast to Oregon.

Dead Whales Tell No Tales takes place at OSU’s Marine Science Center on the Oregon Coast. A marine biologist dies under bizarre circumstances and his assistant, Martindale’s friend, is arrested for his murder. The death occurs during a conference of the International Whaling Commission at the Center. In Martindale’s mind, there are many more likely suspects: the Japanese fisheries minister, an Eskimo whaling commissioner, several radical environmentalists. At the same time, a large Gray whale has beached herself nearby, adding a unique aura to the events on land. Along with solving the murder, the book provides interesting background on the hunting and saving of whales.

Lights, Camera…Murder involves the death of a young female student during the filming of some recruiting ads for the university. Martindale is working with a Portland ad agency to produce the TV ads and knows the girl, who is also a cheerleader. The story encompasses other subject too: an unscrupulous football coach who exploits black players, the high stakes game of building student enrollment.

In Murder at Yaquina Head, Martindale becomes involved in helping a French professor find out who is trying to kill her. After she gives him her memoirs as a Resistance fighter in World War II, the woman is murdered. As Martindale searches for her killer using clues form the manuscript, he must also contend with a mentally challenged former colleague who seems to be trying to point the finger at him. The book contains a story within a story: the French woman’s dramatic exploits during World War II and how their revelation has consequences for the present in a small town on the Oregon Coast. [Published by Sunstone Press in April 2002]

Murder Below Zero offers a complete change of pace for Martindale. He leaves campus to sign onto a whale research expedition in the Arctic as a science writer. The voyage is unique: an attempt to study ice as a tool for national security. As the research progresses, rival Russian scientists show up to interfere and steal the ice data. The rivalry turns deadly when an early freeze traps the men and women of the expedition in a massive ice shield and people start dying mysteriously. The events oddly parallel a similar (and real) disaster Martindale happens to be writing about, which took place in 1897.

Searching for Murder plays out during the long process of selecting a new university president. Martindale has been chosen as a member of the committee. During meetings, all of the jealousies and maneuverings of various members are revealed. The candidates come in for interviews one by one and they also represent various “types.” Nothing is as fraught with dramatic possibilities and subplots as the deliberations to pick a university president. At the same time the search is going on, the university is suddenly faced with campus demonstrations when a Vietnam era protestor (now a popular professor) is fired and a series of bombings (which may be linked to one of the candidates for president). The candidate will do anything to keep the past hidden—including committing murder.